Trieste

(Paperback)

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Description

An old woman sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy. She is waiting to be reunited with her son. He was fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her sixty-two years before by the Nazi authorities during the German occupation.

By focusing on the experiences of one individual, Drndic engages head-on with the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust and deals unsparingly with the massacre of Jews in Trieste's concentration camp.

A literary collage comprising photographs, scraps of poetry, interviews and testimonies from the Nuremburg Trials, it is a formally daring work of immense power and scope.

Reviews

Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick. -- Craig Seligman * New York Times *
Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Daa Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are. -- MAAZA MENGISTE * author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize *
'Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary ... It is a masterpiece' A.N. Wilson, Financial Times. * Financial Times *
'Original, moving and beautifully translated and produced' Guardian. * Guardian *
'A literary tour-de-force' Amanda Hopkinson, Independent. * Independent *
'The multifarious elements that comprise Haya's story and its grand context are an incredibly dense and potent mixture' Daniel Dahn, Independent on Sunday. * Independent on Sunday *

Author Bio

Dasa Drndic is a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, born in Zagreb in 1946. She spent some years teaching in Canada and gained an MA in Theatre and Communications as part of the Fulbright Programme.

Ellen Elias-Bursac is the leading translator of Serbo-Croat into English. Her translation of David Albahari's novel Gotz and Meyer was awarded the National Translation Award by the American Literary Translators Association in 2006.